The A.I. Dilemma - Transcript
Written and Performed by J.T. Bushnell, Oregon State University Senior Instructor of English
I heard an incredible story on the radio recently. A Harvard researcher named Emily Weinstein was talking to a group teenagers about their opinions on AI, and one of the teenagers said that his friend’s dad had used AI to write a birthday card for his wife, which apparently brought her to tears, it moved her so deeply. But here’s the crazy part, at least to me. The teenager who told the story thought it was a great example of AI’s value. To him, it showed why AI was useful in your writing. The other teenagers agreed.
Weinstein, the researcher, said that her reaction was a little different, and she wanted to understand their viewpoint better. A different teenager explained, “Isn’t the intention what matters? Like, if he brings you flowers from a flower store, he didn’t grow the flowers or pick them. And you still think it’s really nice. So, isn’t that kind of like what’s happening here?”
Whoa.
Now, I should mention that I haven’t been able to track down this story from its original source, NPR, or on a podcast where it was repeated, and so it’s possible it was retracted. Maybe the researcher’s memory of the incident wasn’t totally accurate. I don’t know. But either way, I think it highlights the core of the issue when it comes to using AI to do your writing, and your reaction to the story might tell you a lot about your opinion on this issue. Do you think the birthday card was a good use of AI, or not? Is it the product that matters? The document? The writing in the card? Or is there some other element that matters more? If so, what is that element?
Let me pause here to tell you that I use AI, mostly for two things. One is cooking. When you have to put dinner on the table for your family, night after night, sometimes it helps to get new ideas or instructions, especially if the fridge is getting empty or you’re getting tired of the usual options. I don’t feel guilty about it. I care about putting dinner on the table. It’s the product that matters to me, not the process.
The other place I use AI is writing that I don’t find particularly rewarding, valuable, or interesting. These are things like bureaucratic forms nobody really cares about, simple contracts or legal documents, or multiple-choice questions for reading quizzes, which take an insane amount of time and effort to construct well. I do a lot of reviewing and adjusting and rewriting in all of these, but it’s the same as cooking – it’s about the outcome, not the process, because there’s nothing enriching about it. Even for someone who enjoys writing, like me, it’s just drudgery.
For some people, that’s what all writing feels like: drudgery. They only want to arrive at the outcome, the meal, the document, as quickly and easily as possible. For these people, I’d imagine it seems perfectly acceptable to use AI to write a wife’s birthday card, especially if the card is so effective. But I wonder how the wife would feel if she knew the writing came from AI. Would she see it as a bouquet from the florist? Or like an exam her husband had cheated on? How would you feel?
For some of us, a lot of writing is enriching, interesting, meaningful, even enjoyable. In these situations, it’s not just about the product. It’s about giving expression to something inside you. It’s about discovering what you want to say, and then saying it. It’s about pursuing a solution to problems you aren’t sure how to handle. It’s about exercising or developing a skill, about connecting with other people, being understood. In these situations, we’re interested in more than just the destination. We’re interested in the journey, because that journey fulfills something deeply personal and human in us. For those reasons, we think it’s worth it to do the work ourselves, even if AI can spit out a document as good as ours, or better.
The question is where to draw the line. That’s what we’re really arguing about when it comes to AI. It’s the heart of the issue with the birthday card, and the essence of the dilemma facing writing students. Teachers usually see their coursework as important, enriching, even interesting. Students sometimes see it as drudgery, and therefore not worth their time and effort. For them, turning in an assignment is like putting dinner on the table. For teachers, there is no dinner. It’s not the paper that’s important but the learning and skill you develop while you’re working on it. Both sides are drawing the line at a different location, and so they have different opinions about the value of AI.
We could probably all benefit from thinking a little harder about the purpose of our assignments, whether we’re the ones giving them or completing them. But outside the classroom, it might also help to consider it from your reader’s perspective. Do they only want the bouquet? Or do they care whether you grew the flowers yourself? Which one matters more to you when you’re reading? Or deciding who to work with? Or figuring out who to love and trust?
